News-Record.com

RALEIGH — Despite spending more than she raised in the second quarter of the year, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole  still has more than twice the money in the bank as her Democratic rival.

Dole, a Republican, had about $2.7 million in the bank as of July 1. Democrat Kay Hagan , a state senator from Greensboro, had about $1.2 million. Chris Cole , a Charlotte-area

Libertarian, said he does not plan on raising money for the campaign.

“We have a two-to-one edge,” Dole spokesman Hogan Gidley said. “That’s a pretty big deal.”

Earlier this summer, Dole aired two different television ads. After their broadcast, Dole jumped ahead to a double-digit lead in most polls.

Although candidates for statewide office spend some money on paying staff, organizing volunteers and developing an Internet site, the bulk of their spending goes toward advertisements on radio and television .

Gidley said that was almost certainly how Dole would leverage her fundraising advantage.

“We plan to use that money to go up on TV and remind people of all that Sen. Dole has accomplished in the short time she’s been in the Senate,” Gidley said.

Staffers for the Hagan campaign said the two sets of fundraising numbers indicated that the Democrat was gaining ground in the race.

Hagan spokeswoman Colleen Flanagan said the Democrat has quadrupled her cash on hand during the same time period that Dole had “burned through” so much cash she had less in the bank than in April.

Still, Dole both out raised Hagan and had more money left over to carry the campaign in the fall.

“As a Democrat, it concerns me that Dole has more than twice as much in the bank today, which is four months out from the election, and the last I saw she had a double-digit lead in the polls,” said Gary Pearce , a consultant who once worked for statewide candidates such as Jim Hunt .

“Hagan has a disadvantage as a challenger.  The fact is, they’d like to be much closer in both cash and the polls.”

Pearce said that the race was not out of reach for Hagan, but that the fundraising numbers showed she still had an “uphill” climb.

Carter Wrenn , a Republican consultant who worked for Sen.  Jesse Helms and now co-authors a political blog with Pearce, agreed that Dole’s fundraising advantage would be a large one “if the playing field were level.

“The question then remains, what if there is a national trend,” he said.

Such national trends — sometimes called waves or tides — occur when candidates in one party have an advantage over candidates in another party for reasons that overwhelm traditional factors such as regional loyalties, incumbent status or how much candidates raise and spend.

Such trends occurred in 1994 when Republicans swept to power in Congress and in 2006, when voter dissatisfaction with President Bush helped Democrats take control. It was in 2006, for example, that Democratic Senate candidates in Montana and Virginia won office despite being outspent by incumbent Republicans — a fact often cited by Hagan’s campaign.

This year, Wrenn said, bad economic news, continued frustration with the war in Iraq and Barack Obama’s campaign — which has generated a good deal of interest in the country’s first African American candidate and unprecedented amounts of campaign donations — could create a similar trend.

“Then Dole’s challenge becomes not so much defeating Hagan as surviving that wave,” Wrenn said.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker@news-record.com